I'm not exactly sure why I bought The L.E.D. Wars. I don't remember reading anything about this title, and I never had a friend who was enough into gaming to give me tips on games to buy (and if I had, I would have stopped talking to him soon after playing this game). I probably just had some extra money, and since it most probably seemed better than the other games I never heard about on the shelf, I thought to myself 'How bad could it be?'. Well, I'm here to tell you just how bad a game can be. If there's a Hell, RTS-fans are probably forced to play it there. The premise of The L.E.D. Wars is rather simple and unsophisticated. An accident has forced Humanity into taking a drug (L.E.D., for Liquid Evolution Drug) which they must keep taking in order to stay alive. You're a new employee in one of the many corporations who make money off cultivating the plants that create this L.E.D. and then putting it on the market. Since it's pretty much the only means of survival for all of Humanity (not considering food and water), all bets are off, so rival companies often try to destroy each other using infantry, tanks, infantry-tank hybrids, and what I'd guess would be aircraft-type and/or navy-type units, as I never got past the first level. When you start the game you're greeted to the worst intro I've ever seen. First you have a poorly-made robot voice read to you the history of the world of L.E.D. Wars, then you're treated to an awful documentary about how the accident happened (or rather, just look at the accident from far away as it happens, so you're only treated to lousy explosions and sound-effects), followed by how the L.E.D. plant is planted and sowed for a minute or two (even farmers would start snoring at this point). Then, you get to some action! No wait, those are just some units moving around, and when they finally finish moving into position and start shooting, the poor experience is made even worse because of the poor voice-acting and sound-effects. Once the intro is finally over, you realize just how bad this game is... It only works at the low resolution of 640x400. Trying to play while your screen is at a higher res' will result in you not being able to scroll down in the game screen. When you choose to start playing (choosing from easy-to-normal-to-hard difficulty), you're treated to a commercial about L.E.D., made by L.E.D.U.S., the corporation you work for. Next you find yourself looking at the scenario-objectives while the C.E.O. of the corporation blabbers on and on, followed by a military officer who tells you to go at 'em, while seeming to hardly be able to wait for his lines to be finished so that he can run away, just as I should have done as soon as I laid my eyes on this title. The game-play mechanism isn't really any different from those of RTS games from Westwood. You have the constructor vehicle which you use to create other buildings (Quantum Plants, Troop Barracks, Seed Factories for building Harvesters and for unloading the L.E.D. plants sowed). What was interesting was that your harvesters also plant (using Seeds, which are created by Seed Factories) the LED plants, which made the gathering of resources kind of simple, which was nice. It also made things slow, as once you reaped the plants you had to re-seed the farming grounds (special areas which are distinguished by a darker shade of brown) and then wait for the plants (that look, rather suspiciously, like Tiberium) to grow back. Anyway, once you produce a few Harvesters and lead them to the farm-yards, you can pretty much leave them alone. What you do need to worry about is oil, as oil doesn't grow on trees and you need it to construct vehicles and buildings. The game itself wasn't really that tough, as I managed to beat the scenario of the first level pretty quickly (The Artificial Intelligence was pretty artificially dumb). I did just as I was told: I built the Quantum Plant (Power Plant), Barracks (They didn't even rename the building!), ordered some Harvesters built from the Seed Factory (Refinery) and let them do their job. I then trained some grainy-looking troops, and destroyed the enemy camp. Once done with all the objectives... Nothing happened. Not only was the level the opposite of entertaining, they wouldn't even give me the ability to get to the next level, to see if anything improves. The graphics were sub-standard for the time, as they hardly rival those of the original Command & Conquer and were only a tad better than those seen in Dune 2. The audio wasn't really better. While the in-game music wasn't all that bad, the voice-acting and general combat sounds seemed to originate from a low-budget 80's Sci-Fi film. In short, this game is broken in almost all aspects. Do not buy, do not rent, do not agree to keep it for that guy who seems desperate to give this title to someone. Wasting even a dime on a game for a single un-satisfying level would be enough to grant you a Darwin Award.
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